AMMONOIDS AND ICHTHYOSAURS: NEVADA PALAEONTOLOGY

Time Slows at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park

Around half past five, as the first flush of dawn appears, our group was up and ready to visit a site that has been on my bucket list for some time.

High on the hillside up a long entry road sits the entrance to Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in central Nevada. It is a short 2-hour drive from our lodgings through orange-hued grasslands and low sloping hills.

A worn American flag and sun-bleached outbuildings greet you on your way to the outcrops. Away from the hustle and bustle that defines the rest of Nevada this place feels remarkably serene. Your eyes squint against the sun as you search for ammonoids and other marine fossil fauna while your nose tends to the assault from the bracing smell of sagebrush.

This site holds many stories. The interpretive centre displays wonderful marine reptiles, ichthyosaurs in situ, as you might expect from the name of the park — but it also showcases years of history lovingly tended. This stretch of dry golden low hills dappled with the yellow of creosote and desert grasses is an important locality for our understanding of the Carnian-Norian boundary (CNB) in North America.

The area is known worldwide as one of the most important ichthyosaur Fossil-Lagerstätte because of the sheer volume of remarkably well-preserved, fully articulated (all the sweet bones laid out all in a row...) specimens of Shonisaurus popularis.

Rich ammonoid faunas outcrop in the barren hills of the Upper Triassic (Early Norian, Kerri zone), Luning Formation, West Union Canyon, Nevada. They were studied by N. J. Silberling (1959) and provide support for the definition of the Schucherti and Macrolobatus zones of the latest Carnian — which are here overlain by well-preserved faunas of the earliest Norian Kerri Zone. 

The genus Gonionotites, very common in the Tethys and British Columbia, is for the moment, unknown in Nevada. The Upper Carnian faunas are dominated by Tropitidae, while Juvavitidae are conspicuously lacking. 

Middle Triassic Ammonoids

Despite its importance, no further investigations had been done at this site for a good 50 years. That changed in 2010 when Jim Haggart, Mike Orchard and Paul Smith — all local Vancouverites — collaborated on a project that took them down to Nevada to look at the conodonts and ammonoids. They did a bed-by-bed sampling of ammonoids and conodonts in West Union Canyon during October of that year.

October is an ideal time to do fieldwork in this area. There are a few good weeks between screaming hot and frigid cold. It is also tarantula breeding season so keep your eyes peeled. Those sweet little burrows you see are not from rodents but rather largish arachnids. 

The eastern side of the canyon provides the best record of the Macrolobatus Zone, which is represented by several beds yielding ammonoids of the Tropites group, together with Anatropites div. sp. 

Conodont faunas from both these and higher beds are dominated by ornate metapolygnthids that would formerly have been collectively referred to Metapolygnathus primitius, a species long known to straddle the CNB. Within this lower part of the section, they resemble forms that have been separated as Metapolygnathus mersinensis. Slightly higher, forms close to Epigondolella' orchardi and a single Orchardella n. sp. occur. This association can be correlated with the latest Carnian in British Columbia.

Higher in the section, the ammonoid fauna shows a sudden change and is dominated by Tropithisbites. Few tens of metres above, but slightly below the first occurrence of Norian ammonoids Guembelites jandianus and Stikinoceras, two new species of conodonts (Gen et sp. nov. A and B) appear that also occur close to the favoured Carnian/Norian boundary at Black Bear Ridge, British Columbia. Stratigraphically higher collections continue to be dominated by forms close to M. mersinensis and E. orchardi after BC's own Mike Orchard.

The best exposure of the Kerri Zone is on the western side of the West Union Canyon. Ammonoids, dominated by Guembelites and Stikinoceras div. sp., have been collected from several fossil-bearing levels. Conodont faunas replicate those of the east section. The collected ammonoids fit perfectly well with the faunas described by Silberling in 1959, but they differ somewhat from coeval faunas of the Tethys and Canada. 

The ammonoid fauna paints a compelling picture of Tethyan influence with a series of smoking guns. We see an abundance of Tropitidae in the Carnian, a lack of Pterosirenites in the Norian, copious Guembelites, the Tethyan species G. philostrati, the stratigraphic position of G. clavatus and the rare occurrence of Gonionotites. Their hallelujah moment was likely finding an undescribed species of the thin-shelled bivalve Halobia similar to Halobia beyrichi — the clincher that perhaps seals this deal on Tethyan influence. 

I'll take a boo to see what Christopher McRoberts published on the find. A jolly good idea to have him on this expedition as it would have been easy to overlook if the focus remained solely on the conodonts and ammonoids. McRoberts has published on the much-studied Pardonet Formation up in the Willison Lake Area of Northeastern, British Columbia. He knows a thing or two about Upper Triassic Bivalvia and the correlation to coeval faunas elsewhere in the North American Cordillera, and to the Boreal, Panthalassan and Tethyan faunal realms. 

If you fancy a read, they published a paper: "Towards the definition of the Carnian/Norian Boundary: New data on Ammonoids and Conodonts from central Nevada," which you can find in the proceedings of the 21st Canadian Paleontology Conference; by Haggart, J W (ed.); Smith, P L (ed.); Canadian Paleontology Conference Proceedings no. 9, 2011 p. 9-10.

Fig. 1. Location map of Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park

Marco Balini, James Jenks, Riccardo Martin, Christopher McRoberts, along with Mike Orchard and Norman Siberling, did a bed by bed sampling in 2013 and published on The Carnian/Norian boundary succession at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park (Upper Triassic, central Nevada, USA) and published in January 2014 in Paläontologische Zeitschrift 89:399–433. That work is available for download from ResearchGate. The original is in German, but there is a translation available.

After years of reading about the correlation between British Columbia and Nevada, I had the very great pleasure of walking through these same sections in October 2019 with members of the Vancouver Paleontological Society and Vancouver Island Palaeontological Society. It was with that same crew that I'd originally explored fossil sites in the Canadian Rockies in the early 2000s. Those early trips led to paper after paper and the exciting revelations that inspired our Nevada adventure.

If you plan your own adventure, you'll want to keep an eye out for some of the other modern fauna — mountain lions, snakes, lizards, scorpions, wolves, coyotes, foxes, ground squirrels, rabbits, falcons, hawks, eagles, bobcats, sheep, deer and pronghorns.

Figure One: Location map of Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. A detailed road log with access information for this locality is provided in Lucas et al. (2007).

HERMIT CRAB: REAL ESTATE TYCOONS

This little cutie is a hermit crab and he is wearing a temporary home borrowed from one of our mollusc friends. 

His body is a soft, squishy spiral that he eases into the perfect size shell time and time again as he grows. 

His first choice is always the empty shell of a marine snail but will get inventive in a pinch — nuts, wood, serpulid worm tubes, aluminium cans or wee plastic caps. 

They are inventive, polite and patient. 

You see, a hermit crabs' desire for the perfect bit of real estate will have them queueing beside larger shells — shells too large for them — to wait upon a big hermit crab to come along, discard the perfect home and slip into their new curved abode. This is all done in an orderly fashion with the hermit crabs all lined up, biggest to smallest to see who best fits the newly available shell. 

There are over 800 species of hermit crab — decapod crustaceans of the superfamily Paguroidea. Their lineage dates back to the Jurassic, 200 million years ago. Their soft squishy, weakly calcified bodies do not fossilize all that often but when they do the specimens are spectacular. Think of all the species of molluscs these lovelies have had a chance to try on — including ammonites — and all the shells that were never buried in sediment to become fossils because they were harvested as homes.  

On the shores of British Columbia, Canada, the hermit crab I come across most often is the Grainyhand hermit crab, Pagurus granosimanus. 

These wee fellows have tell-tale orange-brown antennae and olive green legs speckled with blue or white dots. 

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, a shell is known as x̱ala̱'is and gugwis means house on the beach. 

I do not know the Kwak’wala word for a hermit crab, so I will think of these cuties as x̱ala̱'is gugwis — envisioning them finding the perfect sized shell on the surf worn shores of Tsax̱is, Fort Rupert, Vancouver Island. 

MEET ACICULOLENUS ASKEWI AFTER DON ASKEW

A new species of trilobite from the upper Cambrian McKay Group was introduced in March of 2020: Aciculolenus askewi.  The species is named after Don Askew, an avid fossil hunter of Upper Cambrian trilobites from Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada, who has discovered several new species in the East Kootenays. 

Don was the first to brave the treacherous cliffs up the waterfall on the west side of the ravine below Tanglefoot mountain. That climb led to his discovery of one of the most prolific outcrops in the McKay Group with some of the most exciting and best-preserved trilobites from the region. 

The faunal set are similar to those found at site one — the first of the trilobite outcrops discovered by Chris New and Chris Jenkins — an hours hike through grizzly bear country.

The specimens found at the top of the waterfall are not in calcite wafers, as they are elsewhere, instead, these exceptionally preserved specimens are found complete with a thin coating of matrix that must be prepped down to the shell beneath. 

Askew was also the skill preparator called upon to tease out the details from the 'gut trilobite' recently published from the region. In all, this area has produced more than 60 new species — many found by Askew — and not all of which have been published yet.

I caught up with Don last summer on a trip to the region. He was gracious in openly sharing his knowledge and a complete mountain goat in the field — a good man that Askew. Not surprising then that Brian Chatterton would do him the honour of naming this new species after him. 

Chatterton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, is an invertebrate palaeontologist with a great sense of humour and a particular love of trilobites. Even so, his published works span a myriad of groups including conodonts, machaeridians, sponges, brachiopods, corals, cephalopods, bivalves, trace fossils — to fishes, birds and dinosaurs.

Brian Chatterton has been visiting the East Kootenay region for many years. In 1998, he and Rolf Ludvigsen published the pivotal work on the "calcified trilobites" we had begun hearing about in the late 1990s. There were tales of blue trilobites in calcified layers guarded by a resident Grizzly. This was years before logging roads had reached this pocket of paleontological goodness and hiking in — bear or no bear — was a daunting task. 

In his Cambridge University Press paper, Chatterton describes the well-preserved fauna of largely articulated trilobites from three new localities in the Bull River Valley. 

The Dream Team at Fossil Site #15, East Kootenays

All the trilobites from these localities are from the lower or middle part of the Wujiajiania lyndasmithae Subzone of the Elvinia Zone, lower Jiangshanian, in the McKay Group. 

Access is via a bumpy ride on logging roads 20 km northeast of Fort Steele that includes fording a river (for those blessed with large tires and a high wheelbase) and culminating in a hot, dusty hike and death-defying traipse down 35-degree slopes to the localities.

Two new species were proposed with types from these localities: Aciculolenus askewi and Cliffia nicoleae. The trilobite (and agnostid) fauna from these localities includes at least 20 species that read like a who's who of East Kootenay palaeontology: 

Aciculolenus askewi n. sp., Agnostotes orientalis (Kobayashi, 1935), Cernuolimbus ludvigseni Chatterton and Gibb, 2016, Cliffia nicoleae n. sp., Elvinia roemeri (Shumard, 1861), Grandagnostus? species 1 of Chatterton and Gibb, 2016, Eugonocare? phillipi Chatterton and Gibb, 2016, Eugonocare? sp. A, Housia vacuna (Walcott, 1912), Irvingella convexa (Kobayashi, 1935), Irvingella flohri Resser, 1942, Irvingella species B Chatterton and Gibb, 2016, Olenaspella chrisnewi Chatterton and Gibb, 2016, Proceratopyge canadensis (Chatterton and Ludvigsen, 1998), Proceratopyge rectispinata (Troedsson, 1937), Pseudagnostus cf. P. josepha (Hall, 1863), Pseudagnostus securiger (Lake, 1906), Pseudeugonocare bispinatum (Kobayashi, 1962), Pterocephalia sp., and Wujiajiania lyndasmithae Chatterton and Gibb, 2016.

Chris New, pleased as punch atop Upper Cambrian Exposures

It has been the collaborative efforts of Guy Santucci, Chris New, Chris Jenkins, Don Askew and Stacey Gibb that has helped open up the region — including finding and identifying many new species or firsts including Pseudagnostus securiger, a widespread early Jiangshanian species not been previously recorded from southeastern British Columbia. 

Other interesting invertebrate fossils from these localities include brachiopods, rare trace fossils, a complete silica sponge (Hyalospongea), and a dendroid graptolite. 

The species we find here are more diverse than those from other localities of the same age in the region — and enjoy much better preservation. 

The birth of new species into our scientific nomenclature takes time and the gathering of enough material to justify a new species name. Fortunately for Labiostria gibbae, specimens had been found of this rare species had been documented from the upper part of Wujiajiania lyndasmithae Subzone — slightly younger in age. 

Combined with an earlier discovery, they provided adequate type material to propose the new species — Labiostria gibbae — a species that honours Stacey Gibb and which will likely prove useful for biostratigraphy.

Reference: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-paleontology/article/abs/midfurongian-trilobites-and-agnostids-from-the-wujiajiania-lyndasmithae-subzone-of-the-elvinia-zone-mckay-group-southeastern-british-columbia-canada/E8DBC8BD635863E840715122C05BB14A#

Photo One: Aciculolenus askewi by Chris Jenkins, Cranbrook, British Columbia

Photo Two: L to R: Dan Bowden, Guy Santucci, Chris Jenkins, Dan Askew and John Fam at Fossil Site #15, East Kootenay Region, British Columbia, Canada, August 2, 2020.

Photo Three: Chris New pleased as punch atop of Upper Cambrian Exposures in the East Kootenay Region, British Columbia, Canada

OLENELLUS OF THE EAGER: CRANBROOK, BRITISH COLUMBIA

The partial specimen you see here is an Olenellus trilobite from the Eager Formation near Cranbrook, British Columbia.

It was exciting to crack open the rock and find a specimen, many specimens, more than half a billion years old. It is something we so rarely do but the opportunity is all around us in the many sedimentary rocks that outcrop near the surface around the globe. 

Near Cranbrook, the Eager Formation outcrops at several locations just outside of town. This particular lovely is from the Rifle Range locality and is in my collection at 98-CR-EF042 — meaning it was collected in 1998 and the 42nd find of the day. This is a prolific site and with diligent collecting, you can find many wonderful specimens of scientific and aesthetic value in the course of a day.

The Rifle Range locality sits on the Silhouette Rifle Range — which is literally on a rifle range where folks go to shoot at things.

The fossils we find here are just a shade older than those found at the Burgess Shale. Burgess is Middle Cambrian and the species match the Eager fauna one for one but the Eager fauna are much less varied. 

Olenellus is an extinct genus of redlichiid trilobites, early arthropods, that litter this glorious Cambrian site. Olenellus is the only genus currently recognised in the subfamily Olenellinae. The sister group called the Mesonacinae consists of the genera Mesonacis and Mesolenellus.

Olenellus range in size but are about 5 centimetres or 2.0 inches long on average. They lived during the Botomian and Toyonian stages, Olenellus-zone, 522 to 510 million years ago, in what is currently North America in what was part of the paleocontinent of Laurentia.

Olenellus are both common in and restricted to Early Cambrian rocks — 542 million to 521 million years old — and thus a useful Index Fossil for the Early Cambrian. 

Olenellus had a well-developed head, large and crescentic eyes, and a poorly developed, small tail. The fellow you see had a bit of his tail crushed as he turned to stone.

Trilobites were amongst the earliest fossils with hard skeletons. While they are extinct today, they were the dominant life form at the beginning of the Cambrian and it is what we find as the primary fossil in the fauna of the Eager Formation. 

A slightly crushed lingulida brachiopod

The Eager Formation has produced many beautifully preserved Wanneria, abundant Olellenus and a handful of rare and treasured Tuzoia and Anomalocaris claws. The shale matrix lends itself to amazing preservation. 

The specimens of Wanneria from here are impressively large. Some are up to thirteen centimetres long and ten centimetres wide. You find a mixture of complete specimens and head impressions from years of perfectly preserved moults.

From July 21 to 31, 2015, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), under the direction of Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron carried out a palaeontological dig at an exposure of the Eager Formation that outcrops between Cranbrook and  Fort Steele in the East Kootenay Region of British Columbia. 

The team included David George (APS), Dr. Bob Gaines (Pomona College), Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron (ROM), Dr. Gabriela Mangano (University of Saskatchewan), Maryam Akrami (ROM), Darrell Nordby (APS), Joe Moysiuk (University of Toronto), and local, Guy Santucci (APS and project field co-ordinator), and Dr. Mark Webster (University of Chicago).

Dr. Caron was interested in the fauna of the Eager Formation as there is an overlap with the Burgess Shale species — the Eager is a window into time 513 million years ago — 8 million years earlier than the Burgess. 

Lower Cambrian Brachiopod

They found the usual suspects, including multiple specimens of Wanneria dunnae and Olenellus ricei along with the rarer genus Mesonacis, in addition to specimens of the elusive Tuzoia. 

They also found a block with at least 112 individual trilobites (mostly moulted cephalons) of Olenellus ricei and Wanneria dunnae. 

The most exciting of their finds included a sponge, Anomalocaris, Morania (a cyanobacterial growth), and a hyolithid similar to the Burgess Haplophrentis.

They also found many trace fossils. There was a particularly fetching 30 cm trace fossil, likely from a large Wanneria, that I hope Dr. Mángano or one of her graduate students lend their gaze — Gabriela is a particularly good writer. 

She is co-editor of Palaios, in addition to being a member of the editorial board of a number of journals, including Journal of Paleontology, Paleontologia Electronica, Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology, Ameghiniana, and Revista Brasilera de Paleontologia. Gabriela is a member of the Scientific Board of the UNESCO International Geoscience Program (IGCP), member of the SEPM Board, and Treasurer of the International Ichnological Association. Add all that to extensive fieldwork and supervising over fifteen graduate students and postdoctoral fellows — she's an amazing woman.

Their excavation of the site was thorough — reducing all of the potentially fossil-bearing strata to pieces the size or smaller than a dinner plate. The 2015 team used a backhoe to take off the weathered top layer and get down to the bedrock below.

It has been six years since their visit and we will hopefully see some worthy publications from their efforts. There had been talk of multiple publications stemming from the spectrum of species, a comparison to the Burgess fauna and papers on the trace fossils. I checked in with Joe Moysuik from the University of Toronto who had been on the dig in 2015. To his knowledge, no new papers have yet to be published — though, Caron has been a busy bee on a sexy new nektobenthic suspension feeder from the Burgess material. I am rather hoping their team sorts out the naming of some of the species and gets them to publication so we can finally put them to bed.

Days after my correspondence with Moysuik, Chris Jenkins, a Cranbrook local and huge contributor to our knowledge of Upper Cambrian trilobites, shared an exciting find. 

He and Don Askew had ventured out together for their first fossil field trip of 2021 — and made a rather auspicious start to the year. 

The two had met some 10 years previous when Don, an avid outdoorsman and Jenkins' neighbour, had wandered over to see what all the rocks were about in Jenkins' yard. 

Tales of trilobites and a lifelong friendship ensued. It was also the beginnings of shared fieldwork. This time, it was to outcrops of the Eager Formation just outside of Cranbrook. Together, the two unearthed a three-foot-wide band of Eager Formation bedrock. Not unusual in and of itself — but instead of the usual trilobites — this rock revealed several varieties of Lower Cambrian brachiopods. 

Jenkins shared photos of at least three different types of brachiopods — potentially new fauna for the Eager. Although they superficially resemble the molluscs that make modern seashells, they are not related. Brachiopods were the most abundant and diverse fossil invertebrates of the Paleozoic — over 4500 genera known; the number of species is far greater. So, naturally, we had expected to find brachiopods in the Eager Formation as they were abundant in Lower Cambrian seas — but so far they had eluded us.

And, interestingly, the rock containing the brachiopods is devoid of any trilobite specimens — not a one. Have they found a wee slip of the Eager Formation that records a nearshore environment or have they stumbled across a segment that records another time period altogether?

The brachiopods you see in the photos above are roughly 1/4 inch to 3/4 inches. Should Caron and team return to the site, these new brachiopods will be of great interest as they look to rewrite the geology and palaeontology of the site and region. 

FOSSIL FISHAPODS OF CANADA'S FAR NORTH

Qikiqtania wakei, a fishapod & relative to tetrapods

You will likely recall the amazing tetrapodomorpha fossil found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, Tiktaalik roseae. 

These were advanced forms transitional between fish and the early labyrinthodonts playfully referred to as fishapods — half-fish, half-tetrapod in appearance and limb morphology. 

Up to that point, the relationship of limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) to lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygians) was well known, but the origin of significant tetrapod features remained obscure for the lack of fossils that document the sequence of evolutionary changes — until Tiktaalik. 

While Tiktaalik is technically a fish, this fellow is as far from fish-like as you can be and still be a card-carrying member of the group. 

Interestingly, while Neil Shubin and crew were combing the icy tundra for Tiktaalik, another group was trying their luck just a few kilometres away. 

A week before the eureka moment of Tiktaalik's discovery, Tom Stewart and Justin Lemberg unearthed material that we now know to be a relative of Tiktaalik's. 

Meet Qikiqtania wakei, a fishapod and close relative to our dear tetrapods — and cousin to Tiktaalik — who shares features in the flattened triangular skull, shoulders and elbows in the fin. 

Qikiqtania (pronounced kick-kick-TAN-ee-ya)

But, and here’s the amazing part, its upper arm bone (humerus) is specialised for open water swimming, not walking. 

The story gets wilder when we look at Qikiqtania’s position on the evolutionary tree— all the features for this type of swimming are newly evolved, not primitive. 

This means that Qikiqtania secondarily reentered open water habitats from ancestors that had already had some aspect of walking behaviour. 

And, this whole story was playing out 365 million years ago — the transition from water to land was going both ways in the Devonian.

Why is this exciting? You and I descend from those early tetrapods. We share the legacy of their water-to-land transition and the wee bony bits in their wrists and paddles that evolved to become our hands. I know, mindblowing!

Thomas Stewart and Justin Lemberg put in thousands of hours bringing Qikiqtania to life. 

The analysis consisted of a long path of wild events— from a haphazard moment when it was first spotted, a random collection of a block that ended up containing an articulated fin, to a serendipitous discovery three days before Covid lockdowns in March 2020.

Both teams acknowledge the profound debt owed to the individuals, organizations and indigenous communities where they had the privilege to work — Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay— Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, the largest and northernmost territory of Canada. 

Part of that debt is honoured in the name chosen for this new miraculous species. 

Aerial View of Ellesmere Island

The generic name, Qikiqtania (pronounced kick-kick-TAN-ee-ya), is derived from the Inuktitut words Qikiqtaaluk and Qikiqtani which are the traditional place name of the region where the fossil was discovered. 

The specific name, wakei, is in memory of the evolutionary biologist David Wake — colleague, mentor and friend. 

He was a professor of integrative biology and Director and curator of herpetology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley who passed away in April 2021. 

Wake is known for his work on the biology and evolution of salamanders and vertebrate evolutionary biology. 

If you look at the photo on the left you can imagine visiting these fossil localities in Canada's far north.

Qikiqtania was found on Inuit land and belongs to the community. Thomas Stewart and his colleagues were able to conduct this research because of the generosity and support of individuals in the hamlets of Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, the Iviq Hunters and Trappers of Grise Fiord, and the Department of Heritage and Culture, Nunavut.

To them, on behalf of the larger scientific community — Nakurmiik. Thank you! 

Here is the link to Tom Stewart's article in The Conversation & paper in Nature that dropped yesterday:

1. Stewart, Thomas A.; Lemberg, Justin B.; Daly, Ailis; Daeschler, Edward B.; Shubin, Neil H. (2022-07-20). "A new elpistostegalian from the Late Devonian of the Canadian Arctic". Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04990-w. ISSN 0028-0836.
2. Stewart, Thomas. "Meet Qikiqtania, a fossil fish with the good sense to stay in the water while others ventured onto land" The Conversation. Retrieved 2022-07-20.

Image One: An artist’s vision of Qikiqtania enjoying its fully aquatic, free-swimming lifestyle. Alex Boersma, CC BY-ND

Image Two: A new elpistostegalian from the Late Devonian of the Canadian Arctic, T. A. Stewart, J. B. Lemberg, A. Daly, E. B. Daeschler, & N. H. Shubin.

A huge shout out to the deeply awesome Neil Shubin who shared that the paper had been published and offered his insights on what played out behind the scenes!

ARTURIA BEAUTY FOR SHELLIE

This lovely Lower Miocene nautiloid is Aturia angustata collected on the foreshore near Clallam Bay, Olympic Peninsula, northwestern Washington. 

I have been exploring Washington State for many years. It is rugged, windswept and has amazing fossil exposures all along its northern edge. The area goes by the name of the Olympic Peninsula and it is a wilderness playground. The sites I usually visit are Majestic Beach for its rare but prized fossil whale bone.

Further west are the beach exposures that have fossil echinoids in matrix and Ghost shrimp claws in concretion. There is a clay mine that holds wonderful nautiloids like the creamy Aturia you see here. Sometimes they are cemented together and come out whole. Sometimes calcified and show yellow, brown and white when you hold them to the light. Further up are the beach exposures along Clallam Bay.

Aturia is an extinct genus of Paleocene to Miocene nautilids within Aturiidae, a monotypic family, established by Campman in 1857 for Aturia Bronn, 1838, and is included in the superfamily Nautilaceae in Kümmel, 1964.

Aturia is characterized by a smooth, highly involute, discoidal shell with a complex suture and subdorsal siphuncle. 

Their shells are rounded ventrally and flattened laterally; the dorsum is deeply impressed. The suture is one of the most complex within Nautiloidea. It has a broad flattened ventral saddle, narrow pointed lateral lobes, broad rounded lateral saddles, broad lobes on the dorso-umbilical slopes, and a broad dorsal saddle divided by a deep, narrow median lobe. 

The siphuncle is moderate in size and located subdorsally in the adapical dorsal flexure of the septum. Based on the feeding and hunting behaviours of living nautiluses, Aturia most likely preyed upon small fish and crustaceans. It is well worth exploring the exposures at Clallam Bay. The local clay quarry is on private land so you would need to seek permission. I have also seen calcified beauties of this species collected from river sites within the Olympic Peninsula range, though I have not explored these myself.

ART OF THE PORTAGE: BOWRON LAKE CIRCUIT

A cool morning breeze keeps the mosquitoes down as we pack our kayaks and gear for today’s paddling journey. 

It is day four of our holiday, with two days driving up from Vancouver to Cache Creek, past the Eocene insect and plant site at McAbee, the well-bedded Permian limestone near Marble Canyon and onto Bowron Provincial Park, a geologic gem near the gold rush town of Barkerville.

The initial draw for me, given that collecting in a provincial park is forbidden and all collecting close at hand outside the park appears to amount to a handful of crushed crinoid bits and a few conodonts, was the gorgeous natural scenery and a broad range of species extant. It was also the proposition of padding the Bowron Canoe Circuit, a 149,207-hectare geologic wonderland, where a fortuitous combination of plate tectonics and glacial erosion have carved an unusual 116-kilometre near-continuous rectangular circuit of lakes, streams and rivers bound on all sides by snowcapped mountains. From all descriptions, something like heaven.

The east and south sides of the route are bound by the imposing white peaks of the Cariboo Mountains, the northern boundary of the Interior wet belt, rising up across the Rocky Mountain Trench, and the Isaac Formation, the oldest of seven formations that make up the Cariboo Group (Struik, 1988). 

Some 270 million-plus years ago, had one wanted to buy waterfront property in what is now British Columbia, you’d be looking somewhere between Prince George and the Alberta border. The rest of the province had yet to arrive but would be made up of over twenty major terranes from around the Pacific. The rock that would eventually become the Cariboo Mountains and form the lakes and valleys of Bowron was far out in the Pacific Ocean, down near the equator.

With tectonic shifting, these rocks drifted north-eastward, riding their continental plate, until they collided with and joined the Cordillera in what is now British Columbia. Continued pressure and volcanic activity helped create the tremendous slopes of the Cariboo Range we see today with repeated bouts of glaciation during the Pleistocene carving their final shape.

We brace our way into a headwind along the east side of the fjord-like Isaac Lake. Paddling in time to the wind, I soak up the view of this vast, deep green, ocean-like expanse that runs L-shape for nearly 38 kilometres, forming nearly half of the total circuit. The rock we paddle past is primarily calcareous phyllite, limestone and quartzite, typical of the type locality for this group and considered upper Proterozoic (Young, 1969), the time in our geologic history between the first algae and the first multicellular animals. It is striking how much this lake fits exactly how you might picture pristine wilderness paddling in your mind’s eye. No powerboats, no city hum, just pure silence, broken only by the sound of my paddle pulling through the water and the occasional burst of glee from one of the park’s many songbirds.

We’ve chosen kayaks over the more-popular canoes for this journey, as I got to experience my first taste of the handling capabilities of a canoe last year in Valhalla Provincial Park. The raised sides acted like sails and kept us off course in all but the lightest conditions. This year, Philip Torrens, Leanne Sylvest, and I were making our trek in low profile, Kevlar style. One single & one double kayak would be our faithful companions and mode of transport. They would also be briefly conscripted into service as a bear shield later in the trip.

Versatile those kayaks.

The area is home to a variety of plant life. Large sections of the forest floor are carpeted in the green and white of dogwood, a prolific ground cover we are lucky enough to see in full bloom. Moss, mushrooms and small wildflowers grow on every available surface. Yellow Lily line pathways and float in the cold, clear lake water. Somewhere I read a suggestion to bring a bathing suit to the park, but at the moment, I cannot imagine lowering anything more than my paddle into these icy waters. To reach the west side of the paddling route, we must first face several kilometres portaging muddy trails to meet up with the Isaac River and then paddle rapids to grade two.

At the launch site, we meet up with two fellow kayakers, Adele and Mary of Victoria, and take advantage of their preceding us to watch the path they choose through the rapids. It has been raining in the area for forty plus days, so the water they run is high and fast. Hot on their heels, our short, thrilling ride along the Isaac River, is a flurry of paddle spray and playing around amid all the stumps, silt and conglomerate. 

The accommodation gods smile kindly on us as we are pushed out from Isaac River and settle into McLeary Lake. An old trapper cabin built by local Freddie Becker back in the 1930s, sits vacant and inviting, providing a welcome place to hang our hats and dry out. From here we can see several moose, large, lumbering, peaceful animals, the largest members of the deer family, feeding on the grass-like sedge on the far shore. The next morning, we paddle leisurely down the slower, silt-laden Cariboo River, avoiding the occasional deadhead, and make our way into the milky, glacier-fed Lanezi Lake.

Like most mountainous areas, Bowron makes its own weather system and it appears you get everything in a 24-hour period. In fact, whatever weather you are enjoying seems to change 40 minutes later; good for rain, bad for sun. 

Wisps of cloud that seemed light and airy only hours early have become dark. Careful to hug the shore, we are ready for a quick escape from lightning as thundershowers break.

Paddling in the rain, I notice bits of mica in the water, playing in the light and the rock here changes to greywacke, argillite, phyllite and schist. Past Lanezi, we continue onto Sandy Lake, where old-growth cedars line the south-facing slopes to our left and grey limestone, shale and dolostone line the shore. 

Mottled in with the rock, we sneak up on very convincing stumps posing as large mammals. Picking up the Cariboo River again, we follow it as it flows into Babcock Lake, an area edged with Lower Cambrian limestone, shale and argillite. At the time these rocks were laid down, the Earth was seeing our earliest relatives, the first chordates entering the geologic scene.

As we reach the end of Babcock Lake and prepare for our next portage I get my camera out to take advantage of the angle of the sun and the eroded rounded hilltops of the Quesnel Highlands that stand as a backdrop.

Leanne remarks that she can see a moose a little ways off and that it appeared to be heading our way. Yes, heading our way quickly with a baby moose in tow. I lift my lens to immortalize the moment and we three realized the moose are heading our way in double time because they are being chased by a grizzly — at top speed. 

A full-grown moose can run up to fifty-six kilometres per hour, slightly faster than a Grizzly. They are also strong swimmers. Had she been alone, Mamma moose would likely have tried to outswim the bear. Currently, however, this is not the case. From where we stand we can see the water turned to white foam at their feet as they fly towards us.

We freeze — bear spray in hand.

In seconds the three were upon us. Mamma moose, using home-field advantage, runs straight for us and just reaching our boats, turned 90 degrees, bolting for the woods, baby moose fast on her heels.

The Grizzly, caught up in the froth of running and thrill of the kill, doesn’t notice the deke, hits the brakes at the boats and stands up, confused. Her eyes give her away. This was not what she had planned and the whole moose-suddenly-transformed-into-human thing is giving her pause. Her head tilts back as she gets a good smell of us.

Suddenly, a crack in the woods catches her attention. Her head snaps around and she drops back on all fours, beginning her chase anew. Somewhere there is a terrified mother moose and calf hoping the distance gained is enough to keep them from being lunch. I choose to believe both moose got away with the unwitting distraction we provided, but I’m certainly grateful we did.

The Lakes are at an elevation of over 900 m (3000 ft) and both grizzly and black bear sightings are common. Both bear families descend from a common ancestor, Ursavus, a bear-dog the size of a raccoon who lived more than 20 million years ago. Seems an implausible lineage having just met one of the larger descendants. While we’d grumbled only hours earlier about how tired we were feeling, we now feel quite motivated and do the next two portages and lakes in good time. 

Aside from the gripping fear that another bear encounter is imminent, we enjoy the park-like setting, careful to scan the stands of birch trees for dark shapes now posing as stumps. Fortunately, the only wildlife we see are a few wily chipmunks, various reticent warblers and some equally shy spruce grouse.

The wind favours us now as we paddle Skoi and Spectacle Lake, even giving us a chance to use the sails we’ve rigged to add an extra knot of oomph to our efforts. Reaching the golden land of safety-in-numbers, we leap from our kayaks, happy to see the smiling faces of Mary and Adele.

Making it here is doubly thrilling because it means I am sleeping indoors tonight and I can tell the bear story with adrenaline still pumping through my veins. Tonight is all about camaraderie and the warmth of a campfire. Gobbling down Philip’s famous pizza, Leanne impresses everyone further by telling of his adventures in the arctic and surviving a polar bear attack.

This is our first starlit night without rain, a luxury everyone comments on, but quietly, not wanting to jinx it. We share a good laugh at the expense of the local common loons — both Homeo sapien sapien and Gavia immer. The marshy areas of the circuit provide a wonderful habitat for the regions many birds including a host of sleek, almost regal black and white common loons.

Their cool demeanour by day is reduced to surprisingly loud, maniacal hoots and yelps with undignified flapping and flailing by night. It seems hardly possible that these awful noises could be coming from the same birds and that this has been going for nearly 65 million years, since the end of the age of dinosaurs, as loons are one of the oldest bird families in the fossil record.

A guitar is pulled out to liven the quiet night while small offerings, sacred and scare this late in our journey, are passed around. Tonight is a celebration that we have all, both separately and together, made our way around this immense mountain-edged circuit.